Writing for Enjoyment (or to scare the pants off of a classmate)

            I have been spending time in a 6^th grade literacy intervention class this semester. The students are nearly always pleasant and willing to interact with the content. One of the ways the CT is required to measure and improve their literacy skills is through the use of a computer program. Twice a week, this group of students goes to the computer room for time with the reading program. They seem to enjoy the program for the most part as they are frequently calling to me for verbal affirmation after completing a step or lesson. My belief is that they are buying into a sense of self-management. However as someone who is less than technologically confident, when they have computer problems I am quick to call for help from either the CT or the building tech guru.

            Recently two new students were moved into the class while two others (my unofficial favorites) were moved to a different class. The two new students were males, one had just come to Kansas after beginning the school year in Minnesota, the other has an ethnic first and last name that imply Asian or Middle Eastern descent. Neither of them knew each other before their first day in our Literacy Intervention class. Doubling their discomfort, it was a computer day. Because they were new, they did not yet have the proper information to log on to the computers and access the materials. They had panic written on their faces, the CT with her hands already full of dealing with the other students had a similar expression upon her countenance. I offered to take the two new guys and work with them at a nearby table for the period. The CT and the boys were both happy with that option.

            I led the boys just outside the classroom to the foot of a staircase leading from the second floor to the third floor. The third floor at my placement middle school is a place of mystery. Never used (anymore) for daily classes, it is now perpetually dark and presumably empty. I have feigned fear of the “haunted third floor” with other students in the past. These new students accepted my assertion of the third floor as creepy with no resistance. I pointed to the dark doors at the third floor landing and told the boys, “This is your writing prompt; a student went to the third floor and disappeared. No one knows what happened to that student. Go!”

            They nearly tore my hand off as I handed them each a piece of paper and pencils. Immediately they had a few questions. “Can it be about you? Can we make it about a ghost? Can we write about other students?” I answered (perhaps recklessly) in the affirmative to all of their questions. I just wanted them to write. And write they did. For over fifteen minutes straight (that’s like two years in middle school time) their pencils scratched away at their papers. Once a student asked me for help spelling a word, but other than that they were silent, writing, working, and dare I say learning. I joined them and wrote my own story.

            It was clear that they were enjoying the activity as smiles covered their faces. When one student finished he handed me his paper with a proud grin. I read it and some parts of it were good and spooky. His build up to the climax was in place, he used descriptive words and imaginative dialogue. I read the second student’s work when he had finished. Similarly it had several of the important elements a reader looks for in a scary story. Thankfully, neither had abused the privilege of using me or other students in their story, though I did get abducted by ghosts in both stories. Their finished stories would have needed a lot of polish to be perfect. One student used no capital letters or punctuation. The other misspelled several words and made some conventional mistakes, but I did not correct a thing on either paper. We shared our stories and enjoyed creating them. Days later, both students asked to read their stories to the class, something for which I am willing to bet that neither has ever requested permission.

            These students would have probably been discouraged if I had corrected all of the errors on their papers. I did not tell them in so many words but I wanted to communicate “an expectation that students will write well, but not necessarily that the teacher is going to read the writing exclusively for mechanics and require that the student revise on the basis of teacher feedback” (Principal leadership p. 60) rendering it as interesting exercise rather than work. They both seemed aware that their work was not perfect when I pointed out a mistake here or there. I also think that the guarantee of an audience for their work played a part in their strong efforts. I believe that with some work, I could get these students to write more and integrate proper conventions into the prompts. I hope that they will continue to write on their own and seek out interesting prompts like the haunted 3^rd floor. I am already investigating other useful writing prompts within the school building.        

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2012, March 1). Writing, Not Just in English Class. Principal Leadership, 58-60.

Graphic Fables to the Rescue!

Online Reflection #1

            

            The first few weeks of the school year in the classroom, I have observed my CT’s efforts to engage her students in the subject matter of Language Arts. The preferred methods appear to be having the students read along silently with an audio file or teacher read aloud, followed by pair shared reading in order to find textual evidence answer a related question. The class has tackled a few unmemorable short stories by this method. Finding textual evidence to support their claims seems as draining and foreign to them.  Like a dentist with no anesthesia in a cage full of cavity stricken gorillas, the CT struggles to pull answers from her students. They resist and avoid what needs to be done. They just are not acting engaged. This is alarming because I am pre-planning lessons to teach to this same group of un-enthralled students. I want to find a way to engage them in a text.

I feel that a high quality method of helping students to establish a comfort level with a text is to facilitate their production of a written work. We learn best by doing, or so I have been taught. I also recall the notion of writing students are thinking students. My lesson may need to include this facet of literacy training. In the past I have read about a method of fable writing in Beat Not the Poor Desk by Marie Ponsot. Ponsot described a palpable enthusiasm that begins to develop among the students half way through the lesson. The simplicity of the writing task and the personal philosophy that gets to be stated as the “moral” of the story grant young writers a chance to develop confidence and familiarity with the mysterious medium of words. To complement the fable writing lesson with which I will challenge these students, I wish also to include a graphic organizer for them to analyze either their own work and/or that of a peer. The graphic organizer will call for students to critically examine their fables and perhaps their future writings will be better for the experience.

Last year, I observed a CT who had an arsenal of graphic organizers with which his students displayed comfort and familiarity. Such organizers could be used regardless of the textual information’s format (letters, stories, newspaper articles, or textbook pages) and they were an easy way to chunk information for later study. The organizational nature of current graphic organizers amazes me with its practicality and user-friendliness for study or reference. When properly completed, the graphic organizers with which I am growing familiar as an educator can provide excellent study prompts, detail reference, and when they are stored in a binder or notebook, they help explain to students the scaffolding of information that they have been taught. Fisher and Frey claim that graphic organizers aid in “extending student understanding of concepts and the relationship between them” (p.101). The possession of worthy, self-made study/reference material should increase a student’s comfort level with the information as well as their confidence and motivation to show mastery of the material.

Fisher, D. & Frey, N.  (2012). Improving adolescent literacy: Content area strategies at work  (3^rd ed.).  Boston:  Pearson.

Ponsot, Marie, and Rosemary Deen. Beat not the poor desk: writing: what to teach, how to teach it, and why. Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1982. Print.